Electronic devices, such as mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDA's), often contain firmware and application software that are either provided by the manufacturers of the electronic devices, by telecommunication carriers, or by third parties. These firmware and application software often contain software bugs. New versions of the firmware and software are periodically released to fix the bugs or to introduce new features, or both.
There is a problem with generating update packages in an efficient mode when at least a portion of the content in a mobile phone image is compressed, or encrypted, or both. There is a problem in minimizing the size of an update package that contains a difference information for a code transition between an old version to a new version.
A common problem in the differential compression of executable files is the pointer mismatch due to code relocation. When a block of code is moved from a memory region to another, all pointers to that region will change accordingly. If in the old version a pointer points to an address A and in the new version of the same code, the same pointer points to B, it is likely that other pointers to A will be changed in the new version into pointers to B. Incorporating such issues into a solution is not easy. In addition, automating the generation of update packages when code changes dramatically between an old version and a newer version is still an art form and prone to errors, and therefore needs tweaking.
Sometimes, mobile handsets need to be provisioned before they can be used in a network. This requires a provisioning protocol, provisioning servers, etc. However, if there are many different types of devices being used in the network, multiple provisioning servers may have to be used, employing multiple protocols, and multiple servers. This comes with associated management problems.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.